Welcome to Soap Stop and Body Shop, where we make all of our own soap and body products and then test them on ourselves for your convenience and safety. Recipes are tweaked and perfected to ensure the best product makes it to the shelf, but occasionally an item simply never makes it to the shelf. Like an ingenious idea I had just last week:
Turmeric Masks.
Turmeric has a host of skin-loving properties; it is an anti-inflammatory, it is a skin tightener and toner, and is use…d in Asian cultures to inhibit facial hair growth. It performs beautifully in soap, so I figured that it would be ten times better as a mask.
I was mildly interested in the suggestions from other soapers that turmeric masks should be mixed with honey or milk, but since I live in a house with 2 teenage boys, milk is a rare commodity, and I sure as hell was not wasting the honey deftly procured from my hive on a facial mask. Milk and honey deficient, I just whipped it up with a little water and Moroccan clay and smeared it all over my face, then hopped into a eucalyptus tea-infused bath.
After soaking awhile and feeling convinced that I could feel the facial hair follicles shriveling and dying under the power of my new mask, I rinsed my face in the tub and frowned at my hands. They were quite yellow. Still clueless, I had a brief concern about what must be causing sudden jaundice, and I resolved to drink less Crown and Pepsi and more water in order to give my liver and kidneys a break. Satisfied with this pact with myself, I smugly relaxed back into the water.
Half an hour later, thoroughly relaxed and prunified, I crawled out of the water to the mirror to examine the miraculous effects of the Turmeric Wonder Mask.
I actually screamed like a girl, causing Kim to holler from the other room, “What was THAT all about?!”
“Umm…nothing! Everything is fine, nothing to see here!”
But I was, in fact, staring into the mirror at someone who looked alarmingly like Marge Simpson.
My face was yellow…and I don’t mean just a little yellow. I mean my face was banana yellow. And my palms were still yellow. Neck, arms, legs all still pleasantly pink, and as I looked at my hands and face, it dawned on me that this was not a Crown and Coke-induced liver inadequacy…this was TURMERIC!!
Fortunately, I was not the only person who had this ingenious plan, so on Dumbasses Anonymous (aka Google), I discovered two things: first, sugar and water would cure my case of “jaundice” 🙄, and second, the reason turmeric should be mixed with milk or honey is to avoid staining your skin!
In retrospect, this makes sense, but the turmeric mask still did not make the cut; the soap is a much better option. We do, however, have several clay and activated charcoal masks that are so wonderful they made me forget the turmeric mask experience…
Almost.
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